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yellowTAB's Zeta 1.0 Reviewed
Provataki writes "OSNews' Thom Holwerda posted the first in-depth review of the recently released Zeta 1.0. He goes over installation, impressions, usage, application and hardware support, BFS queries and concludes that yellowTAB's Zeta is the deserving future of BeOS; plus, it's the only one based on the original source code by Be, Inc."
Look, a faint dim spark that still lights the way toward the wondrous land of OSes that are not encumbered with the baggage of Unix and Windows.
The forward thinking population of
* It's old.
* It's not Linux or OSX.
* It's not free.
They will ignore the fact that:
* Much of what OSX has just started to do, in terms of usability, BeOS explored all the way back then.
* It's really easy to develop fast GUI apps for.
* And to develop for in general.
* Diversity is good, and a billion people writing GNU-style apps for Linux is not diversity.
In summary, I -- hey! Get out of my yard! Damn kids these days.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Well, BeOS's target was always in high-end multimedia, and old boxes aren't always the best for that sort of thing, regardless of OS...
I'm not sure if this applies to Zeta or not, but to make a point about this argument that crops up whenever someone forks a project or appears to re-tread old ground: Programmers are not interchangeable, especially if they are programming for free, and in their spare time. Such programmers will tackle the projects that interest them, and if deprived of such projects, may well opt to not tackle anything at all rather than help with an (to them) uninteresting project.
For the MTV generation maybe, but I didn't see a great deal of depth there: filesystems? 3D support? network stack quality? hardware coverage? It looked a lot more like "I installed some CD and this is what happened" to me.
Not to mention that a review containing "Firefox 1.0.3 requires no introduction, however, a few notes on it are justified: fast & stable. I do not know what the yT guys and girls have done, but they made Firefox on BeOS stable and usable. And that's a great achievement." strikes me as a little suspect. Is Firefox not normally fast and stable, or is the reviewer really stuck for good things to say about Zeta?
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
The sad part is that you can hardly run it on an old box. To run it properly you need at least a good video card (which I never spent much on).
Actually, the sad part is that you have to pay out the heinie (~$114 USD I think) for it. I give YellowTab props for picking up the project but damn...I can buy Windows XP Pro for $85 USD.
You'll have that sometimes...
"I'll just hack together a distro"
And for media pros without the skill, time or inclination to do that, here's BeOS! Ready-made for what they need. Understand?
And maybe BeOS was offering this stuff before the others were; did you think of that? Maybe there's an established user base of people who want to keep using the OS they're used to, rather than switch to one you'd like to see them using. Maybe they don't like your choice of OS, and maybe they wouldn't like the one you'd put together for them.
Maybe Be and YellowTAB "get it" in the exact way that you don't.
I think Roscoe has probably never used BeOS, much less Zeta. Although I will sound like a fanboy of BeOS (or Zeta), I encourage everyone to experience this OS. Other posts and the article talk about low latency, but you need see the OS first hand to understand what this really means. Secondly, with millions of PII '440BX' or similar based systems out there being tossed in the trash pile for no good reason other than they won't run XP very well, they should sing running this OS.
First, let me say I have a dual 133MHz BeBox at home and used to think it was a wonderful system. So I'm not an anti-BeOS zealot.
But exactly what apps are these media pros using on BeOS? The OS can be designed for that kind of work as much as you want, but without the apps to take advantage of it. Correct me if things have changed, but what replacement would any 'media pro' have for any of Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut Pro, Shake, Motion, Logic, Cubase, DVD Studio Pro etc etc? Because those are the apps all the media pros I know of use.
It's nice that BeOS has a fast system-wide search with live queries, and it's nice that it had it before other systems (I remember using it back in 96 or so). But most 'media pros' don't spend all day searching for files.
No matter how great the OS is, no matter how great it is at running on an old machine, it's the apps that matter. Sad, but true.
I might consider installing it on an old machine for my dad who surfs and does nothing much more. But it'd be useless for any 'media pros'.